Comments on "From Freedom to Democracy"

Cover of the book.

From Freedom to Democracy: The Difference Between Government and Self-Determination is a 2017 book published by CrimethInc., a collective of anarchist writers. The book is available for free on their website.

The book is written by a group of anonymous authors who participated in the mass movements (such as the Occupy movement) that took place in America and Europe from 2011~2014. Based on their collective experience in these mass movements, which were noted for utilising directly democratic decision making structures, the authors argue that the ultimate failure of any of the movements to bring about substantive systemic change was largely due to participants conceptualising their movement as "democratic."

The authors make the case that upholding certain decision making structures as "more legitimate" than myriad other decentralised structures also found within the movement inevitably recreates the very statist, authoritarian, non-inclusive institutions that the participants had been revolting against in the first place.

Short TL;DR

People often think they want "democracy," when in reality what they want is equality, inclusivity, and autonomy—values that are more in line with anarchy.

Long TL;DR

The word "democracy" is used to refer to two completely different things: On the one hand it refers to the original meaning of "rule by the people," and on the other, it refers to abstract ideals such as equality, inclusivity, and autonomy.

This lack of distinction is a problem for social movements that call for "more democracy" (in the latter sense), not realising that the ideals they wish to uphold are incompatible with democratic institutions (in the original sense). Even directly democratic organisations inevitably silence minorities and enforce decisions upon people who do not agree with them.

By calling for "more democracy," social movements from as early as 1848 in France all the way up to global uprisings such as the occupy movements that began in 2011 have repeatedly found their movements recreating or reinventing the oppressive structures that they had set out to revolt against, with the movement eventually dissolving back into electoral politics, with no fundamental changes to the system.

The only way to combat this trend is to be aware of how direct democracy recreates representative democracy, to show how the central ideals of democracy are inherently authoritarian, and to develop a social context in which no one is allowed to accumulate institutional power over anyone else; in other words, what we need is not democracy but anarchy.

Comments

(Staz's comments)

I was going through an old notebook, and apparently I actually read part of this book back in 2016. I had written a note about "common denominators of democracy: demos (a way of determining who makes decisions), kratos (a way of enforcing decisions), polis (a space of legitimate decision-making), oikos (the resources that sustain it)" which idea was taken directly from this book.

The book as a whole I think is very stimulating, and poses questions and criticisms regarding democracy (from a leftist perspective) that I've never seen expressed elsewhere. (Not many people are critical of democracy because of the positive values we associate it with.)

Seeing as how the book is written by an unspecified number of anonymous, anarchist authors, there are some glaring contradictions in the text. For example, on page 14 the authors point out that "if all [...] decisions were actually made by the people they impact, there would be no need for a means of enforcing them." This seems to be an argument for more direct democracy, or even consensus-based decision-making. But the authors go on to criticise both of these ideas:

In the final analysis, even the most directly democratic state is better at concentrating power than maximizing freedom. (p. 36)

...

The closer we get to unanimity, the more legitimate government is perceived to be—so wouldn’t rule by consensus be the most legitimate government of all? Then, finally, there would be no need for police. Obviously, this is impossible. (pp. 43-44. Emphasis mine.)

The authors criticise democracy as an institutionalised means of enforcing decisions upon people that disagree with those decisions, but they also fail to put forward any concrete proposal for what to do instead. (The most they put forward are vague principals that ought to be upheld, such as anonymity, horizontality, and decentralisation.)

They raise the question of "If there is no authority to enforce rules, how can we trust that other people will uphold their responsibilities?" but don't seem to give an answer. They also paint democratic decision-making (negatively) as a way of producing a single answer to a problem, as if this is something that no one should ever have to do.

On Consensus

The authors' criticism of consensus is particularly disappointing. As David Graeber pointed out, many activists involved in the Occupy movement had a flawed understanding of consensus; that it was a strict set of rules to be followed to ensure that all decisions are unanimous. This is the understanding of consensus that the authors of From Democracy to Freedom demonstrate, at several points referring to their shared experience of decisions at General Assemblies being blocked by a single person, using this as evidence that consensus-based decision-making is inherently flawed.

Obviously allowing a single individual to entirely block decisions that everyone else is on board with is a real problem. But Graeber argues that this has little or nothing to do with consensus. Rather, consensus boils down to two principles: "freedom" (= no one should be compelled to do anything they don't want to do) and "equality" (= everyone has equal say). Allowing an individual participant to block a decision violates the principle of equality; their individual opinion suddenly has the same power as the combined opinions of everyone else. But on the other hand, enforcing decisions upon minorities that don't agree with them violates the principle of freedom. In other words, as long as you have no way of coercing people to do things they don't want to, what you're left with is consensus-based decision-making, no matter what the particulars are.

Graeber points out that consensus is a useful way of ensuring that decision-making doesn't become too centralised:

Consensus only works if working groups or collectives don't feel they need to seek constant approval from the larger group, if initiative arises from below, and people only check upwards if there's a genuinely compelling reason not to go ahead with some initiative without clearing it with everyone else. In a weird way, the very unwieldiness of consensus meetings is helpful here, since it can discourage people from taking trivial issues to a larger group, and thus potentially waste hours of everyone's time.

Elsewhere in the same article, he stresses that formal consensus process is not always the best way to make group decisions:

Formal process as it exists today has been proved to work pretty well for some kinds of people, under some circumstances. It is obviously completely inappropriate in others. To take an obvious example: most small groups of friends don't need formal process at all. Other groups might, over time, develop a completely different approach that suits their own dynamics, relations, situation, culture, sensibilities. And there's absolutely no reason any group can't improvise an entirely new one if that's what they want to do.

What he's saying here is completely in-line with what the authors conclude in the book, when they stress the importance of decentralisation and allowing for multiple forums of legitimate decision-making. So while it seems that the authors share a lot of common ground with Graeber, they report that "anarchists who shared Graeber’s framework found themselves outside the consensus reality of their fellow Occupiers," and that the movement failed to "reach consensus about the meaning of consensus." Still, they put forward no alternative of their own.

On the Case Studies

The most interesting part of the book is the case studies, where the authors talk about their first-hand experiences participating in spontaneous protest movements that popped up in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008.

In contrast to the relatively abstract, etymological hair-splitting found in the previous chapters, the case studies are refreshingly down-to-earth. Taken as a whole, they provide a good glimpse of what it must have been like to participate in these Occupy and Occupy-adjacent movements. Though separated by both time and distance, there are striking parallels between the movements and the way they developed. Whether in Spain, Greece, the US, Slovenia, or Bosnia, the authors express their disappointment in how each movement began to die as soon as it was re-integrated into the electoral political system:

Spanish democracy has been regenerated. People, having failed themselves, are once again ready to place their trust in politicians, as long as they are new faces making new promises. Direct democracy has revealed how fully it transforms back into representative democracy as it scales up. (105)